10 voices revolving around a shared moment

Crane your neck back and imagine a human speck suspended a
quarter-mile high, tightrope walking between the towers of
the World Trade Center. Colum McCann did to spark his
stunning new book:

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty.
Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that
heard itself, awful and beautiful."

So begins "Let the Great World Spin," a generous,
moving novel capable of disturbing your respiration -- like
the gasping, hooting New Yorkers who watched Philippe Petit
in August 1974 set his death-defying signature in the
Manhattan sky.

"The watchers below pulled in their breath all at
once," McCann writes. "The air felt suddenly
shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though
they had not heard it before. Out he went."

I needed no encouragement to follow. McCann, though, cuts
briskly to the ground, carving out 10 narrators from that
shared air, then connecting them as pointedly as Thornton
Wilder did in "The Bridge of San Luis Rey."

This book takes up religious conviction, too, but it is
more a hymn to the metropolis, gorgeous in its specificity:
"The M22 bus pulled in against the sidewalk, braked,
sighed down into a pothole. A flying chocolate wrapper
touched against a fire hydrant. Taxi door slammed. Bits of
trash sparred in the darkest reaches of the alleyways.
Sneakers found their sweetspots. The leather of briefcases
rubbed against trouserlegs. A few umbrella tips clinked
against the pavement. Revolving doors pushed quarters of
conversation out into the street."

And so, chapter by asymmetrical chapter, the reader enters the minds of McCann's disparate narrators -- nine on the day of the skywalk. We take up with the Irish brother of a renegade monk, a Park Avenue matron, a Guatemalan frustrated in her desire to be a doctor, a 14-year-old subway tagger, a prostitute from Cleveland and the judge arraigning the man on the wire....

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